A blue-ribbon panel of historic preservationists on Oʻahu plans to urge Gov. Josh Green to veto state legislation they say would do grave damage to Hawaiʻi’s historic places.

They fear, in fact, that historic preservation would be gutted under the measures.

“These bills represent reversals in support for our treasured cultural and historic places of antiquity,” said Mahealani Cypher, a commission member who is an expert on Hawaiʻi’s ancient sites. “We urge Gov. Green to be pono and veto these bills.”

At its regular monthly meeting Wednesday, the Oʻahu Historic Preservation Commission voted unanimously to contact the governor to make sure he knows of the concerns.

The nine panelists, including well-known architects, archaeologists and historians, have followed the progress of historic preservation legislation through the session. They include Commission Chair Kehaunani Abad, a cultural historian and vice president at Kamehameha Schools and former director of community engagement at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs; Hailama V. K. K. Farden, senior director of cultural affairs at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and former president of the Hawaiian Historical Society; and Thomas Dye, who holds a doctorate from Yale University and teaches archaeology at the University of Hawaiʻi.

They oppose two measures recently passed by the Legislature. Senate Bill 15 redefines “historic preservation” in ways that opponents say virtually strips many properties from historic preservation review. House Bill 830 allows the state government to hire third-party contractors to do historic reviews for housing projects if the State Historic Preservation Division is backlogged, which the commissioners said they feared would cause problematic conflicts of interest.

Green has the power to veto or sign legislation until July 10.

Overworked And Understaffed

There is wide recognition that the historic preservation process in Hawaiʻi has problems. State law defines historic properties as any building over 50 years old, which is overly broad. Historic preservationists have long suggested that wording be added, such as “of significance,” or “worthy of preservation,” with additional protections added for places that are likely to contain Hawaiian burial or traditional cultural sites.

Everyone agrees the State Historic Preservation Division, which conducts historic preservation reviews, is overworked and understaffed. Historic preservationists have called for more funding for the agency and expedited hiring, as 30 percent of its jobs have gone unfilled. A conservative-leaning nonprofit, the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, has testified that the average SHPD review time is 94 days, and that some reviews take longer.

But these real problems, which need to be fixed, seem to have inspired even greater mischief.

The two bills had the strange shape-shifting process, morphing from one thing to another, that supporters of greater legislative transparency have long decried.

The commissioners were watching ever since the start of the year, before the session started. In January, they discussed and then uniformly opposed using third-party reviewers rather than government historic preservation employees to examine development plans. There are only a small number of firms in Hawaiʻi that are specialists in the work.

“I don’t see how it is possible to avoid some very bad conflicts of interest between most of the third-party reviews,” said archaeologist Richard Davis, who formerly directed the Guam Historic Preservation Offi, during a Jan. 28 commission meeting. “Most of them are already engaged in contracted historic preservation studies on behalf of their clients, so they would inevitably be reviewing their competitors’ work and submitting reviews to SHPD, which then reviews their work on other projects. So the potential of abuse of conflict of interest abounds.”

But it was hard for the commissioners to track the measure, designated as Senate Bill 1002, which they testified was “unacceptable,” but the same idea moved forward instead as HB 830. That caused confusion among the commissioners.

Another Shape-Shifter

It is difficult for commissioners who meet only once a month to react to the quick pace of action in the short legislative session. The commission is forced to operate under Sunshine laws that requires it to post advance notice of issues it plans to debate at upcoming meetings, which means it is frequently overtaken by events without time to react. As bills morphed seemingly overnight, it was blindsided.

SB 15 also had a complicated history. As originally drafted, it was a narrow measure that amended the definition of historic property to include properties over 50 years old, that meet the criteria for being entered into the Hawaiʻi Register of Historic Places, and that have important value to Native Hawaiians or other ethnic groups, including by association with cultural practices. The commission, in fact, supported the original bill.

But then the changes started. The evolving measure excluded residential properties and “nominally sensitive areas,” which were defined to mean places where there was a “low density of historic, cultural or archaeological resources, or where the project area has been substantially disturbed by previous excavation or other ground-disturbing work and no significant historic properties have been previously identified.”

The commissioners were horrified by the proposed changes.

“That’s all of Oʻahu,” said Glenn Mason, founder of a prominent Honolulu architectural firm, at the March 25 commission meeting.

Mason said that historic reviews of properties are essential to know what is there.

“It’s ridiculous,” Mason said. “It seems to say that if you don’t know anything about the site, you don’t have to know anything about the site. (But) you don’t know what’s on the site until you examine the site.”

Dye shared Mason’s negative view of the changing legislation.

“What they did to it was wretched,” he told his colleagues.

The commissioners decided unanimously at the meeting that they needed to oppose the revised bill.

“In effect, SB 15 HD1 seeks to circumvent the historic preservation review process, rather than strengthen it,” Abad wrote in testimony to the Legislature. She asked lawmakers instead to invest in solutions, such as providing sufficient funding to the agency to speed the review process and to support hiring more workers at SHPD.

But real estate lobbyists, including the National Association Industrial & Office Properties, said they liked the new wording better, as did the Maui Chamber of Commerce.

And more importantly for the measure, and probably for the outcome, the Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources went on record in support as well, saying it would allow historic preservation reviews to be completed in a “more streamlined manner.”

Update: The DLNR announced Friday it is now opposing the bills and is recommending the governor veto them because of changes that were made during the Legislature’s conference committee period.

DLNR is SHPD’s parent agency. Both report to Green.